The relevance to the reading process of the perception of spatial location within a multi-letter configuration is being investigated. Recent studies show that skilled and less skilled readers can be differentiated at the level of single letter recognition by their ability to augment visual feature information with spatial redundancy. Spatial redundancy (constraint in printed English in which letters may occur in which serial positions) is dependent upon the perception of order information. One line of research is directed at determining encoding and retention functions for order information in skilled and less skilled readers. The thrust behind a second line of research is to examine the role of spatial redundancy in conjunction with retinal location and item confusability as a function of reading skill. The question of interest is whether spatial redundancy operates by providing a constraint which reduces the number of possible letters at any given serial position, or whether spatial redundancy serves a perceptual function by physically separating letters that look alike, thereby minimizing lateral masking within a multi-letter configuration. Letters and nonlinguistic symbols are being used for stimuli materials. Present studies using adult subjects will be extended to the child population.